SEMANTICS : SENTENCE MEANING : Grammaticality, Acceptability and Meaningfulness

 

SENTENCE MEANING : Grammaticality, Acceptability and Meaningfulness

a.       Definition of sentence meaning

Based on Oxford advanced lerners dictionary, sentence is a set of word expressing a statement, a question or an order, usually containing a subject and a verb. In writen English sentence begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop a period ( . ), a question mark ( ? ) or an exclamation mark/ exclamation point ( ! ). Meaning is a thing or idea that a sound, word, sign, etc.

Based on explanation above, sentence meaning is a set of word expressing a statement or a question that have meaning in the sentence.

 

On the other hand, there are three kinds that should attention in the sentence meaning, that are :

1.      Grammaticality

Fromkin and Rodman describe that grammaticality in sentences and phrases as “the confornity to the syntactic rules”.

Grammaticality is description of a well-formed sequence of words, one conforming to rules of syntax. Commonly sentence can say grammaticality is qualify components of basic word order that consist of, at least, a subject and a predicate/ verb.

Example :

a.       Subject + verb = Alex runs.

b.      Subject + verb + compliment = Brandon is a doctor.

c.       Subject + verb + object = Hana reads a book.

2.      Acceptability

Acceptability is accepted in a particular community and in particular culture. Acceptability is related to social etiquette, rationality and logical coherence.

Example :

a.       His father died last night.

b.      His father passed away last night.

Nevertheless, Lyons describes there are other kinds of acceptability and unacceptability which have nothing to do with whether an utterance is meaningfull or not. In other words, the grammaticality do not depend on whether the sentence is meaningfull or not (Fromkin and Rodman). Besides, Gasser cites that the grammaticality or the acceptability can occur in some non-standard dialect, but ungrammaticality in the standard dialect.

Example :

a.       I come back last night.

b.      I came back last night.

 

3.      Meaningfulness

Meaningfulness is conditioned by how well-formed that sentence is semantically. We will see some examples on the different between sentences grammatically right and has no meaning.

Example :

a.       Harmless young children sleep quitely.

b.      The horse raced past the barn fell.

c.       The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

d.      Colorless green sleep furiously

 

 Writer's note :

New post about semantics, hope it can be useful.... :)

                               suggestion is needed to make it perfect... thanks..